Movies

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Writing failure.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

And CK sums up pretty much exactly how I feel about new Star Trek. That and stuff like "Why the hell does the Romulan ship have such overpowered weaponry? It's supposed to be a mining ship. Who gives a mining ship armaments like this?"

I always assumed he stole and/or salvaged all his weapons. Since it's pretty soon after the end of DS9, there's probably tons of destroyed hulls floating around to pull weapons off. You don't need cutting-edge, experimental hardware to bust shit up if you go back in time 300 years.

[Shale]

I thought it was supposed to be a DIFFERENT sun going supernova that destroyed Romulus. The backstory of Star Trek 2009 is all kinds of stupid, just ignore it and focus on the TOS-era plot.

[Cmdr_King]

Well that's the problem in a nutshell.  There's not enough TOS-era plot left to stand after you ignore all the continuity parts!

[Shale]

What I mean is you ignore all the stuff that happened in the future. Spock let Romulus get blown up, Romulan survivors come back for vengeance. Details of how and why just distract you by being dumb.

[Grefter]

People discussing how if you analyse a piece of Star Trek plot to hard it goes to stupid

Yes.  Yes it does.  For everything.  This is a reboot of ToS, not TNG.  I don't -want- this to make sense.  I want this to be Kirk punching things in the face and getting layed.  Him getting promotions for doing stupid stupid reckless shit and hopefully in the future turning them down because fuck that being a space captain that punches things in the face gets you way more pussy.  Spock getting some on the side from Uhura was a nice touch.

Also need more nods to John Cho as Sulu, good times.  He and Simon Pegg pretty much make up the best of the humor in the movie.

Christian Slater movies to watch (Some of these I still need to watch myself, so a list for two!):
Gleaming the Cube
The Wizard (I HAD NO IDEA HE WAS IN THIS)
Young Guns 2 (cheating, but he is in it)
Pump Up The Volume (A movie that is a perfect representation of 1990-1992 before Grunge took off)
Robin Hood Prince of Thieves (Yeah I went there)
Kuffs
True Romance (If you don't love this movie there is something very wrong with you)
Broken Arrow (for many giggles)
3000 Miles to Graceland
Churchill: The Hollywood Years (what)
He Was a Quiet Man

Waaaay way less stuff from the 80s than I thought though, lots of groovy 90s!

[Sierra]

"Ignore it because it's dumb" doesn't really work for me, though. Suspension of disbelief has to be earned and there's...not really anything else in the movie I can care about enough to make up for the stuff that annoys me. I mean, even ToS wasn't campy just for the sake of being campy. Plenty of that happened because it was the sixties, yeah, but it was also genuinely concerned with pushing what science fiction could be on TV. This is why it got a cult following that kept it alive ten years after being canceled. New ST does not attempt this in any way. J. J. Abrahms's whole "my Star Trek is grittier, sexier, and sparklier" approach just misses the goddamn point for me. It apes the superficial aspects and leaves out the soul.

Anyway...man, Grefter, the only one of those I'm sorta inclined to watch is The Wizard just to confirm its badness (I only saw it once in elementary school). 3000 Miles to Graceland is terrible in a way you shouldn't be able to achieve with that many Elvises.

[Grefter]

True Romance involves the exact right number of Elvises and that is one.  Really early Tarantino script done by somoene else, it has Elvis, it has cocaine and it has a crazy Christian Slater, gun fights and through it all an actually decent albeit somewhat abusive romance.  Good times.

Also Pump up the Volume is great for copious amounts of Leonard Cohen.

Edit - Reading around some more it appears that the Winston Churchill movie is a piss take on action movie blockbusters and stars Slater as Winston Churchill a US Marine and there is a Princess Elizabeth who I am going out on a limb and will guess is probably the love interest (since that is what I would do if I was making fun of the genre).  A shame it was released on 2004 and not 2001 to coincide with Pearl Harbor.  I actually kind of really want to see this now.

[Idun]

Avatar - 6/5. Epic.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Avatar - 6/5. Epic.

Hey, if you like heavy-handed movies with awful dialogue about a guy who owns three private jets preaching to you about environmentalism, have I got a film for you...

[Idun]

Fern Gully?

I was more into the whole beat-their-asses thing moreso than save-the-forest.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Streetcar Named Desire came on Japanese TV late last night and I watched it for the first time.

Good movie, really well-told. The setting is far more repulsive than I had previously imagined it could be.

Also, it somehow manages to have the same subject matter of every Lifetime original movie ever, and it managed to tell it without being crappy.

Brando is suitably creepy, and Leigh is fucking brilliant.

I stayed up way too late watching it, though; and I was late to work... ;_;

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I read the play back in the day, and without the actors' deliveries, you actually rather notice that everyone in the story is a stereotype. Fortunately Brando is awesome.

[Sierra]

Awesomely horrible, yes. Shut the fuck up about the Napoleonic code already, Stanley, for the love of god.

[superaielman]

How can you hate the wizard, Ciddy? ;_; It is late 80's/early 90's cheese at it's best.

[Sierra]

I didn't say I hated it. It takes special effort for me to hate something.

[Scar]

It made the Power Glove legendary.

Also, I'm still waiting for a new Power Glove...

MAKE IT HAPPEN!

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Tape a Wiimote to your forearm.

[BaconForTheSoul]

It made the Power Glove legendary.

Also, I'm still waiting for a new Power Glove...

MAKE IT HAPPEN!

Tape a Wii controller to a glove.

[Grefter]

Be bad, you know, come on.

[BaconForTheSoul]

Beerfest-  Pointlessly amusing and doesn't try and trick you into thinking the movie has a plot worth following.  7/10

[Idun]

The Descent Part 2  -  3/5. Noticeable drop in what story there originally was.
Rocknrolla - Has Toby Kebbell. 3/5.
Battle For Terra - 4/5. I don't know if I mentioned this one. Kind of bland character designs, but an acceptable storyline, good animation and some good environment designs.
Wilderness - 3/5. Has Toby Kebbell. See, fangirl.
Neo Ned - 3/5. Mom made me watch this. Almost threw up in my mouth when I saw it was about "IRR."
X-Files Seasons 7 Episode - Orison. Good shit. Scully cut her hair again.

[metroid composite]

Shutter Island: So...for the first half of the movie I was thinking "oh my god this is the worst movie I've watched like...ever."  The ending is great, though.  Walked away with overall positive feelings towards the movie.

The Lovely Bones: OH MY GOD.  This movie is AWESOME.  I mean, I went in having only heard an interview with the author of the book, so I knew it was about a girl who gets raped and murdered.  What I didn't know was that they were extremely successful at making her likeable, they have a strong cast of characters with very memorable (if sometimes clichee) personalities, and that purgatory pretty much gave them an excuse to go overboard with awesome CG rainbows and butterflies.  Best movie I've seen since...like...Mama Mia.

The Book of Eli: Saw the first hour of this.  It bored me.  Wow, so post-apocalyptic means you spend a lot of time alone walking on roads with no dialogue.  Bored now.  The main character wins 10-on-1 gunfights without a scratch or even ducking for cover?  I'm not feeling any tension at all (I can only guess that he has some protection granted by God or something, but I haven't seen the whole movie).  Maybe it gets better, but I saw nothing that appealed to me.

[Sierra]

Saw Iron Man 2. Decent, not as good as the first one. Sam Rockwell and Mickey Rourke are effective, Scarlett Johansen didn't really need to be in the movie. I mean, we've really reached the saturation point for important characters by the time she shows up. They could've saved some time for important stuff by cutting her out. Goes for the Avengers buildup in general, really. Distracts from the actual Iron Man movie I went to see. Could've even done without Samuel L. Jackson, as the movie starts to slip off the rails when he shows up. Those health problems the hero's been struggling with? "Oh, lemme fix that for you." Tension dissolved without effort. There's a basic disconnect with the first movie in that that one was all about Tony learning to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions and this one sort of goes out of its way to avoid doing just that. One of the villains hates him for something he didn't even do; a mob of robots goes on a rampage explicitly to massacre civilians and apparently no one gets killed or even hurt. Obviously someone wanted to make sure this was kiddie-friendly, but it jars somewhat with how the first movie dealt with violence, which was sparsely but effectively.

Still worth watching because, hell, Robert Downey Jr.. Just could've been better. Story gets warped a little by trying to accommodate the groundwork for a completely different movie.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

The Book of Eli: Saw the first hour of this.  It bored me.  Wow, so post-apocalyptic means you spend a lot of time alone walking on roads with no dialogue.  Bored now.

It IS a pretty glaring flaw of the entire genre pretty much except for the Road Warrior, where they replaced their road scenes with car fights, and Fallout, where they replaced the weeks of walking with a map.